During his recent State of
the Union address, Bill Clinton committed a significant slip of the
tongue. While touching upon his Administration's efforts to enforce child
support payments, Mr. Clinton declared: "A check will substitute for a
parent's love and guidance." Whoops! As prepared for delivery, the text of
the address specified that "A check will never be a substitute for
a father's love and guidance"; perhaps Mr. Clinton simply could not force
himself to utter the sentence as written. One need not be a disciple of
Sigmund Freud to believe that unsettling truths are sometimes disclosed
inadvertently - and Mr. Clinton's "Freudian slip" was actually a very tidy
summation of his Administration's policies toward the family.

Fabian Model

Since coming to power in 1993, the
Clinton vanguard has tirelessly urged the enrichment of AFDC, Head Start,
and other federal welfare programs as a means of "investing in children."
Such "investments" not only create an incentive for single parenthood, but
also make the federal government the surrogate father. By subsidizing the
mother, the state effectively controls the home.

This variety of social control was
pioneered in the early years of this century by Britain's Fabian
Socialists, who pursued the triumph of socialism through political
conquest rather than communist-style violence. In his book New Worlds
for Old, Fabian H.G. Wells wrote that "Socialism regards parentage
under proper safeguards as 'not only a duty but a service' to the state;
that is to say, it proposes to pay for good parentage - in other words, to
endow the home."

The Clinton Administration is
faithfully pursuing the Fabian vision of child care, and that vision is
heartily endorsed in Hillary Rodham Clinton's opus, It Takes a Village
and Other Lessons Children Teach Us.

Like the Fabians, whose insignia
included a wolf in sheep's clothing, Mrs. Clinton seeks to camouflage her
collectivism. The back cover of It Takes a Village displays a
photograph of Mrs. Clinton surrounded by children, and its contents are
written in the same faux-domestic prose which clutters Mrs.
Clinton's syndicated column. Each chapter begins with a treacly epigram
and a personal reminiscence, and some of the book's points are illustrated
by cartoons. By design, the volume is as cloying and unsubstantial as
cotton candy - but it is a confection laced with strychnine.

It Takes a Village is
replete with designs for government "investment" in children. A typical
passage insists: "The next time you hear someone using the word
'investment' to describe what we need to do for our youngest, most
vulnerable family members, think about the investments the village has the
power to make in children's first few weeks, months, and years. They will
reap us all extraordinary dividends...."

The state must be a constant
presence in the home in order to protect its "investment," and therapeutic
police - in the form of social workers or "home visitors" - have no
greater champion than Mrs. Clinton. "I cannot say enough in support of
home visits," she declares. She obliquely chides Americans for failing to
share her enthusiasm, noting that "all Western European countries provide
some form of home health visitors." However, she is enthusiastic about
early intervention programs presently in place in some states, such as
Missouri's "Parents As Teachers" initiative (PAT) and Hawaii's "Healthy
Start" program, both of which use home visitors to supervise parental
decisions in the home.

The PAT program is intended to
encourage the "intellectual development" of children by making each home
an administrative unit of the social welfare state. "Certified Parent
Educators" are assigned to each PAT home with the authority to intervene
in parental decisions. Hawaii's "Healthy Start" program is similarly
structured but justifies its interventionism in the name of preventing
child abuse. Although the program is supposedly restricted to homes which
are designated "at risk" of child abuse, Mrs. Clinton approvingly notes
that Healthy Start "currently screens more than half of the sixteen
thousand babies born in the state each year" - meaning that the program
considers "at risk" homes to be the norm, and healthy homes the
exception.

Writes Hillary, "If the family is
considered to be at risk, Healthy Start offers a follow-up home visitor."
But once the state has infiltrated the home, it does not confine itself to
child abuse prevention. In a March 1993 profile of Healthy Start, ABC
reporter Rebecca Chase observed, "The program is also proving to be an
effective way to link families with other services - birth control,
medical care, and preschool, for example."

Whose Children?

Collectivists from Plato to Mao
Tse-tung have insisted that children are the "common property" of society,
and that the state, rather than the parents, is the custodian of first
resort. Mrs. Clinton tries to finesse the custodianship issue by depicting
the state as a partner in child-rearing: "Keeping children healthy in body
and mind is the family's and the village's first obligation." But this
responsibility can only be exercised by one party - and the state, which
is the instrument of coercion, is obviously the stronger party in this
unequal "partnership."

Indeed, Mrs. Clinton admits as
much by advising the reader that there are "terrible times when no
adequate parenting is available and the village itself must act in place
of parents. It accepts those responsibilities in all our names through the
authority we vest in government...." In questions of child abuse or
neglect, maintains Mrs. Clinton, "a child's safety must take precedence
over the preservation of a family that has allowed abuse to occur" and
"social workers and courts should make decisions about terminating
parental rights of abusive parents more quickly, rather than removing and
returning abused children time and again."

While this might appear to be a
reasonable standard, it begs this question: How is "abuse" to be defined?
Mrs. Clinton suggests that abuse may include not only physical battering
and sexual molestation but "verbal violence." Furthermore, she is critical
of homes which provide inadequate "brain food" for children, and asserts
that the "village" must provide "more and better early education" for
children who live in such homes. Might the failure of parents to provide
federally approved "brain food" for their children be defined as a form of
neglect, remediable only through the seizure of children by "village"
authorities?

"Empowerment" and
Control

Collectivist family schematics
invariably include a eugenicist component, and Mrs. Clinton's vision is no
exception. She offers an unqualified endorsement of the "Program of
Action" produced by the United Nations at the 1994 population control
summit in Cairo. She also declares that "Education and empowerment start
with giving parents the means and the encouragement to plan pregnancy
itself" and insists, "Some of the best models for doing this come from
abroad." Recalling a clinic she visited in Indonesia, Mrs. Clinton writes:
"Every month, tables are set up under the trees in a clearing, and doctors
and nurses hold the clinic there. Women come to have their babies
examined, to get medical advice, and to exchange information. A large
poster-board chart notes the method of birth control each family is using,
so that the women can compare problems and results." She describes this
Indonesian clinic as "a wonderful example of how the village - both the
immediate community and the larger society - can use basic resources to
help families." The attentive reader might point out that the Indonesian
model is also a vivid example of social regimentation through peer
pressure: The program makes parents publicly accountable for their
compliance with the state's population control policies.

Similar methods have been employed
by the governments of Communist China, socialist India, and other havens
of family "empowerment" - and Hillary unblushingly exalts this approach as
a model for health care delivery in the United States.

Toward the "Global
Village"

Mrs. Clinton scolds
"anti-government extremists" for indulging in "second-guessing and
cynicism about the motives and actions of every leader and institution" -
a remarkable complaint coming from an activist who first earned notoriety
as a member of the Watergate investigative team. Like Saddam Hussein, she
knows the value of using children as a "human shield"; she urges readers
to "try applying the invective you hear levelled broadly at 'government
programs' directly to the children who are among their most important
beneficiaries."

Nowhere in the book does she
acknowledge the possibility that government may more often be a malefactor
than a benefactor. Not surprisingly, Mrs. Clinton has little use for the
Constitution and declares, "We cannot move forward by looking to the past
for easy solutions." "Extremists" who insist on clinging to the Founders'
vision, according to Mrs. Clinton, "fail to provide a viable pathway from
the cold war to the global village."

One commentator who wants no part
of Mrs. Clinton's "global village" is The Nation's Alexander
Cockburn, an English expatriate whose childhood acquaintances included
members of the Fabian Society's social circle. "Time and again, reading …
It Takes a Village, I was reminded of [Fabian founder] Beatrice
Webb," observes Cockburn. "There's the same imperious gleam, the same lust
to improve the human condition until it conforms to the wretchedly
constricted vision of freedom that gave us social-worker liberalism,
otherwise known as therapeutic policing."

Lest it be forgotten, in Waco the
Clinton Administration improved upon Fabian-style "therapeutic policing"
by introducing immolation as child therapy - a potent reminder of why
parents should be very suspicious when the "village" elders show up on
their doorstep.

Like most collectivists,
Mrs. Clinton has few compunctions about apropriating the fruits of a
productive person's labors - in this case, the labors of a ghostwriter. In
a syndicated column, Mrs. Clinton claimed to have written the entire text
of It Takes a Village in longhand and professed a desire to "join
the ranks of the computer-competent." The book's title page lists Mrs.
Clinton as the sole author, and the "Acknowledgments" page offers a
perfunctory recognition that "It takes a village to bring a book into the
world" without mentioning any specific names.

However, Simon and Schuster announced in
April 1995 that Georgetown journalism professor Barbara Feinman would
write the manuscript of the book based on audiotapes of interviews with
Mrs. Clinton. A "backgrounder" provided by the White House acknowledges
that "Simon and Schuster selected Barbara Feinman … to help Mrs. Clinton
as she began to write her book" and that the publisher had provided the
First Lady with a fax machine and a word processor (so much for drafting
the manuscript in longhand). Esquire magazine reporter Jeanette
Walls was able to confirm this arrangement with a source close to the
project, but was told by Feinman that she was contractually bound not to
discuss her work for Mrs. Clinton.